Pastoral Medicine

Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 5

Schmidt Number: S-5919

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 5

Dear friends,

We must now go on from the knowledge we have gained
in one direction, of individuals who, although not exactly
having intuition, do develop a perception of the spiritual world and
who show certain aspects of behavior that to a physician may seem to
be pathological but are in fact something quite different, something
more. For as you have seen, the pathological condition remains with
them in statu nascendi and
there is continuous healing coming from the spirit. This is the case
with such personalities as St. Teresa and Mechthild of Magdeburg,
[Note 5]
as well as with male visionaries.

When we study these
individuals, we find that as a first stage the ego organization
separates from the rest of the human organism. It then draws the
astral body closely to it, in a certain sense away from the
physical-etheric organism. This is in the waking state. What is the
consequence of this? You can easily see that this puts the individual
into a kind of dream condition. From a spiritual-scientific point of
view the ego, by drawing the astral body to itself, is not allowing
it to enter the physical and etheric bodies completely, and this
brings about a kind of dream condition. But because of the special
karmic density, both ego and astral body are strong, and they bring
into the dream condition receptivity for the perception of the
spiritual world. Dream is transformed into a state in which the
individual is really able to see into the spiritual world and to feel
the presence of spiritual beings.

Now let us look at the
extreme opposite condition. Here the ego is weak, and the astral body
draws it down too strongly into the rest of the organism —
again in the waking state. Then there is not illumination, as with
visionaries like St. Teresa, but the opposite: a darkening, a
clouding, a lowering of consciousness — in the waking state
— to a dream condition.

One cannot learn to
know this second type of person in the way I have indicated for the
first type. Individuals who feel the presence of spiritual beings,
who come to such final stages as St. Teresa or Mechthild of
Magdeburg, are much more numerous than one would think. One learns to
know them if one has some particular opportunity or if one has
cultivated the corresponding faculties. One learns to know them best
by letting them tell about their conditions. They talk more
interestingly than our ordinary contemporaries. Their narratives are
much more interesting; above all, they speak of things one does not
encounter in everyday life. So they are already interesting in the
first stage.

The opposite
individuals, those whose astral body is drawing the ego down, are
also interesting if one lets them talk about themselves. To
understand the first type of person requires the soul depth of the
priest. To understand this second type of person — who often is
even more interesting than the usual visionaries, who do not develop
very far — really requires the sensitivity of a physician who
comprehends the world with a good intelligence and a fair amount of
intuition. For it is a matter of understanding what they do
not tell one: what they do
tell one is of little value. It is a matter of grasping what they say
or do in such a way that one can think of it in relation to the human
organism. Such persons, if one asks them a question, show a certain
amount of stupidity, also unwillingness to answer a question. They
begin to talk about something quite foreign to what one is asking.
But if one catches hold of what they say about themselves — and
some of them talk endlessly — one sometimes has the feeling
that they possess an inner source of speech that gives them a special
association of ideas such as the ordinary person does not have.
They'll tell you if you let them ramble on — you mustn't ask
questions, you must just snap up what they tell as it were by chance
— For example a man might say: “Sure, ten years ago I was
in a farmer's house and the wife gave me some coffee. The cup had red
roses painted on it. She couldn't give me the coffee right away
because she'd forgotten the sugar was in the kitchen and she had to
go and get it. And she forgot the milk. She had to get the milk from
down in the cellar. And then she poured almost half a cup of milk
into the coffee. And she said, ‘My coffee is very good.’
And I said, ‘Yes, I think so too, farmer lady.’”
And so he goes on and on. He tells incidents from far in his past,
and goes into the most unbelievable details. You think, “If I
only had a memory as good as his!” — forgetting that if
you did have as good a memory you would be just like him! Now of
course I'm telling it this way to portray a type, and to show a
typical outcome. You must then think of the corresponding lighter
variations that you meet in life, which the physician especially
meets. I'm picturing an extreme case so that you can see the chief
characteristics.

So when the astral
body draws the ego organization in, there comes about a kind of power
for reproducing details of memory as though automatically. It is
always ready to repeat them; it is indifferent to logical connections
and just tells things one after another. As a result one can't help
wondering why the person hits upon one thing at one moment and
another thing at the next. His tale can go on like this, for
instance: “The farmer lady went to get the milk and while she
was gone I looked in the corner of the room and there was a Madonna
picture and it was the same one I'd seen thirty years earlier in
another place but there I didn't have coffee but a very good
soup.” It can happen that he comes entirely away from the first
part of his narrative, but it can also happen that he returns to it
again. One sees that this is not a logical memory but a
space-and-time memory, extraordinarily exact, with a compulsive
desire to tell everything. It is a memory in which, when one studies
it more closely, one sees something very remarkable — one sees
its deeper foundation. One notices that the person enjoys the sound
of certain words he had associated with certain events while he was
experiencing the events themselves, and now he takes pleasure in
sounding these words again. He is in fact going back to speech that
was kept in his memory while thoughts were pushed out — not
completely, but almost so.

One also notices
changes in the sphere of the will. To these one must pay attention,
for now the beginning of real pathological conditions can be found.
One will encounter the following — again, one must pay
attention, for nothing much can be acclomplished if, for instance,
one approaches such people to do this or that in order to observe
them. For they become amazingly stubborn, they don't want to
cooperate, won't answer questions, won't do anything. But if one can
obtain an earlier case history and put those things together with
what can be learned from the person's neighbors or a similar source,
then one discovers, for instance, that such a person feels a terrific
impulse at a definite time of the year to go wandering off somewhere.
Often it is to the same region each year. And this inner impulse of
will works so strongly that if one tries at such a moment to
counteract it, just to discover what state the person is in, one can,
for instance, notice the following.

Take a gourmand (there
are gourmands even among such people as these!). Catch up with him
while he is wandering and sit him down to a wonderful meal or two
— to what gives him his greatest joy in life. You'll find that
he will only stay put the first day, possibly a second day if he is
still a good distance from the place he is heading for. He becomes
restless, for he would love another fine meal, and he knows that the
next place he'll reach has frightful food. He knows that, for his
memory is unusually well developed. He becomes anxious. He wants to
go on, for he cannot adapt his will to sudden external suggestions.
Just as on the one hand he cannot adapt himself to immediate sense
impressions but brings out every possible gem from his speech
coffers, so on the other hand he cannot adapt himself to the
necessity of surrendering his will-limb system to life's external
circumstances. He wants just to follow his own will-impulses, which
drive him from within in a very definite manner. One sees that he has
almost completely lost the faculty of the ego organization that
unites a human being with the outer world. His senses are dulled; his
will-impulses prevent him from having a normal relation to the world,
and he wants only to follow these will-impulses. This is the
consequence of the ego being drawn down into the astral body.

So you see, such
people could be helped very much if our medical understanding and the
loving devotion of the theologians would work together — not,
however, by some instant therapy, but in the following way. With
these people one can observe a very definite situation. First we have
to consider their life between the change of teeth and puberty. In
that period, from a superficial point of view usually nothing
abnormal is to be noticed. Everyone loves to see how clever these
children are, how frightfully clever, what clever answers they can
give, “just like an adult!” But one should be alert to
this clever answering between the seventh and the fourteenth year.
The children who are so excessively clever at this age are receiving
something in this period before puberty that they should only have
for their development after
puberty. That is how the condition that I have just been describing
comes about. The astral body should only be drawing the ego down
after puberty, so that then the ego can completely unfold by the
beginning of the twenties. With these children the astral body has
already drawn the ego down after the change of teeth or in the ninth,
tenth, eleventh year. We observe the abnormal cleverness and are
delighted by it. By the time the late teens come, the eighteenth,
nineteenth, twentieth years, the ego is stuck too deeply in the
astral body. Then the condition is present that I have described,
along with the symptoms that I indicated. So now if a child worries
us in those early years by premature cleverness, it is a matter of
giving certain kinds of treatment. First of all, there will be
situations where physician and priest will have to confer with the
teacher, so that the teacher will realize what should be done for
that early life period. When we have finished this general
characterization, we will make several detailed suggestions of what
can actually be done. But first I'd like to carry this further, to
indicate certain clear connections between the various themes we've
been discussing.

Now the following can
happen: the etheric body on its part can draw the astral body and ego
in too strongly, so that they snap to an excessive degree into the
physical and etheric bodies — again in the waking state. Then
we have the situation that, seen from within, there is too much
astrality in the organs; it cannot unite properly with them. This
condition is the pathological mirror-picture of a visionary state
such as, for instance, that of St. Teresa, such as her “first
stage” as I described it, when she felt the presence of
spiritual beings. We had there the bringing of waking-sleep into
clear consciousness. And now in such persons as I am describing we
have the opposite: dreams are carried over into waking life, with the
accompanying symptoms I have mentioned. For it really happens in
waking life: dreams do not appear, but an active “dream”
life that discloses itself in the kind of speech I described, and in
that extreme turning inward of the will impulses. That is the
pathological mirror-picture of ordinary dreaming. Activity is there
instead of the passivity that is the normal condition of
dreaming.

Then we have the
second stage, the drawing down of the ego and astral organization by
the etheric body. The individual snaps too strongly with the ego,
astral body, and etheric body into the physical organism, and the
physical organism is not able to receive them into its single organs.
Every possible organ has excess astrality that could not unite
properly with the organ. Now we have the pathological mirror-picture
of what we learned was the second stage for the individuals in whom
sense impressions were in a certain sense stimulated from within. The
direction was from within out to the senses. Now in this
mirror-picture the direction is the opposite: it goes inward to the
organs, it takes hold of the physical organism. And conditions appear
that always appear when a physical or etheric organ is flooded by the
astral body and ego organization and they cannot unite so that it
could be called a proper saturation of the physical body by the
etheric and astral bodies. Something is left over in the physical
organs from the higher members of the organism. What in the other
type of individuals poured into visions similar to a sense
perception, with colors like a sense perception, visions that
revealed the spiritual world, is in this case pouring itself inward,
wanting to seize a physical organ. In the former situation there was
a reaching out more externally, to the spiritual world beyond the
sense world. In this case there is a reaching inward to a physical
organ, manifesting in so-called “seizures,” all the
different forms of real epilepsy or epileptoid symptoms
(“temporal lobe seizures”). It can be explained as the
snapping down of the ego and astral organization too strongly into
the physical organism, which then succeeds in drawing the etheric
body to itself. We see how the first condition advances to this
second condition.

Hereby we see
something in modern life that could be prevented if a real pastoral
medicine would come about. People do not realize that the first
condition is pathological; they simply find it interesting. And they
only become aware of the second condition when seizures or other
epileptic symptoms appear. The memory is now no longer expanding into
detail, and the inner will-impulses are no longer increasing: now,
since the astral and ego organizations are being pulled inward, and
therefore the astral organization is failing to relate properly to
certain organs, we find the memory is extinguished. Instead of the
memory clinging to details as in the previous condition (details with
no logical relation, that were just a running stream of unassociated
pictures), now we find the memory disrupted, collapsed, a memory with
gaps in it. This can become so extreme that the person lives in a
kind of double consciousness. For instance, the memory clings to the
upper organs — for the whole human being participates in memory
— it takes hold of the upper organs, deserting the lower
organs. Then this is reversed: the upper organs lose the memory
activity and the lower organs receive it again. There is a rhythmic
alteration. Such things can happen. And so these people have two
streams of consciousness flowing parallel to each other. In one
stream they remember everything that occurs when they are in the one
condition; in the other stream they remember all the other things.
And they never know in one condition of consciousness any of the
content of the other condition of consciousness. Thus the memory
deteriorates to a pathological level.

There we have the
pathological mirror-picture of what we found in the second stage of
the saint. Let us use that term, for modern medicine has no word for
such a thing. Saints have a world around them that is visionary but
that has a spiritual content. They reach into the spiritual world and
receive inner impressions of it. People with pathological conditions
— because their karma has given them a weak personality —
are drawn down into the physical body. Instead of receiving visions
of spiritual things they have epileptic conditions, empty gaps in
consciousness, a lack of coherence in daily waking life, and so
forth.

But now there can be
still a third stage. This is the stage at which for karmic reasons
the physical body has become even weaker, along with all the other
members, so that earlier karmic forces no longer operate sufficiently
in the physical body. With such a person it now comes about, not that
ego, astral, and etheric body are pulled in by the physical body, but
that something quite different happens. I shall have to describe it
in the following way.

Think how it is with
those who are extremely sensitive in the other direction, in the
direction of the senses, that is, in the direction of the ego
organization. How painfully sensitive they can be to all that flows
in through the senses, to strong colors, lively sounds. Now precisely
the opposite is the case with those whose physical body is weak from
karmic causes. Such people are not hypersensitive from within
outward, but are insensitive to their physical body and yield to an
excessive degree to everything from the other side, the side of the
will, that is, from the outer physical world. They succumb to
heaviness, warmth, cold. All of this affects them not as it normally
affects organic beings, but as it affects inorganic things. This then
stifles the expression of the astral body and ego. They are hemmed in
by the world and because of a weak physical body they cannot confront
it with the necessary intensity; they are like a piece of the outer
world although they are still inside their physical body. This is
clearly the exact opposite of what we described as the third stage
for the saint. The saint goes through pain that is then transformed
into bliss, and then further to an experience of the spiritual world
in its pure spirituality. This is called “rest in God” or
“rest in the Spirit.”

But people who develop
in the way I am now describing do not come to “rest in
God” or “rest in the Spirit.” They come, although
they are not conscious of it, to rest in the hidden occult forces of
the physical world, forces against which they, as human beings,
should actually be maintaining their independence. They develop the
pathological mirror-picture of the third stage of the saint: the
condition called idiocy, in which the human personality is lost, in
which a person rests in outer nature, that is, in the hidden forces
of nature. They can no longer manifest as a human being. They live
only in the natural processes that go on within them, in what is a
continuation of external natural processes, vegetable processes
— eating food, digesting food, moving about in whatever way
digestion and the food substances give an impulse to move. It is a
complete waking sleep given over to the bodily functions, which are
not under the control of the weak physical body but are active as
processes in the outer world are active. Naturally, since these
processes are working in a human being they do give human-like
impulses. But these people are isolated from the normal human world
because they are pushed into the physical world to too great a
degree. Here we have to do with everything that is a pathological
mirror-picture of the “rest in God.” We can call it
“rest in Nature.” It has to do with the various paranoid
states, with what in everyday life is called idiocy, while the
previous conditions would be called mental retardation.

So we have seen the
progression in the case of the saint from feeling the presence of
spiritual beings to a third stage, being present in the spiritual
world. And we have seen the opposite pathological states: first,
psychopathological impairment as the first stage. We can be
particularly aware of this stage when we encounter an abnormal
wanderlust, as I described, connected with a memory that lacks logic.
We see this progress to states of insanity, of which the early stage
will still allow a person to pursue certain activities in external
life. Then we see this progress to the third stage — which
could also have been present in early childhood
in statu nascendi.

The second stage can
be due to the fact that no one has been able to recognize and
counteract certain conditions in the first life period, between birth
and change of teeth. Occasionally young children show, not exactly an
excessive cleverness, but rather an unusual desire to learn things
— something that should only appear after the change of teeth.
This characteristic is normal between change of teeth and puberty.
When it appears in the first life period, however, we should be
concerned and we should find the means — physical, soul, and
spiritual means — to cure what is already pathological. It is
of utmost importance to investigate how certain capacities can be
prevented from shining down into the first seven years of life that
should really only emerge during the second seven years.

The third stage can
reveal itself in two ways. In most cases a person brings it along as
his or her karma — as you have seen from my descriptions.
Already at birth, the person is in an abnormal condition because of
some unusual stress in putting together the etheric body before
entering the physical body. An etheric body was formed that does not
want to penetrate the physical body completely, does not want to
enter heart and stomach in the proper way but wants to flood them: in
other words, an etheric body that carries the astral body and ego
organization too strongly into the various organs. Already at birth
or very soon after, we see facial or bodily deformities that can give
us deep concern. This is called congenital mental retardation —
but there is no such thing! There is only karmic mental retardation,
related to the child's entire destiny. We will also speak about this
more fully, so that you will see how an incarnation spent in such
mental dullness can, under certain conditions, even have a beneficial
place in a human being's karma, although it may mean misery in that
one incarnation. There is need, after all, to regard things not
merely from the point of view of finite life, but
sub specie aeterni from the point of
view of the immortal life of a human being. Then we would have a
compassionate charity
(caritas) and a wise one as well.

On the other hand, the
second stage I have described can progress to the third stage in the
following way. If in the first life period, between birth and change
of teeth, not only the second life period shines in but also the
third — the period between puberty and the twenties, when our
organization should work into our organism — then we see a
child in their fourth or fifth year with capacities that often
delight the people. They say, “This child talks or acts like a
twenty-year-old!” But this is what is happening: the ego
organization is developing too early and is overpowering the physical
body and making it weak. Idiocy will then appear in the latter part
of the person's life. In this case it is not brought on by karma but
has been acquired in this very life, and can only be balanced out
karmically in later lives. If we observe life intelligently and have
a good pastoral medicine to support us, we will be able to prevent it
simply by providing the proper education for such a person's early
childhood.

Whoever is
vocationally drawn to observe such things should do so not only as
individual symptoms — where, naturally, they should be studied
with special love — but should also cultivate an understanding
for them as a general phenomenon. Such a person should also develop
an understanding for how these things are brought about.

We have seen how much
of the pedagogy of former decades that a healthy pedagogy, such as
the Waldorf school pedagogy wants to be, must definitely oppose. Yet
these things have become extraordinarily precious to people.
Sometimes our Waldorf school education must address certain things
with tremendous severity, for instance, the Froebel kindergarten
work, which is taken not from life but out of the intellect. Before
the change of teeth it occupies children with activities that are not
an imitation of life but are invented out of people's heads. This is
putting into the child's first years of life something that should
not be there until the next period, between change of teeth and
puberty. This brings on the first stage of a pathological condition,
a mild state of illness that often is not yet regarded as
pathological. Also it were better, perhaps, not to label it
pathological, otherwise so much else would have to be labeled
pathological, which must in any case be recognized as “cultural
phenomena.” These things cannot merely be criticized, they must
be understood, so that one relates to them in the right way.

What we should see in
front of us is wrong education in early childhood. The second life
period has been carried into the first. This is the underlying cause
creating a person's automatic speech and stirring the will from
within outwards without adjusting in any degree to the surrounding
world. Think of a situation such as I described as the first
pathological stage: a slight tendency, caused by bad education,
education going the wrong way. Then what happens? Wanderlust. This
impulse is not entirely pathological, but it is characterized by the
desire at a certain age to follow none but one's own ideas, not to
bother about the world, to get free and away from one's surroundings,
to wander at will! It is connected with other contemporary phenomena
that also have their origin in a pathological education, or at least
an education with a pathological tinge. You can observe this right
now. Look at some of these youth groups. Their very existence belongs
to the lifestyle of the last decades of the Kali Yuga.
[Note 6]
There is an affinity between this slightly pathological condition and
the kind of life that the Kali Yuga brought about. These things all
belong together. But they must be examined from these two aspects. If
you look, you will easily see tinges of what I have been describing.
They reveal themselves clearly in wanderlust, but that is an extreme
symptom. Listen once in a while to their conversations! One despairs
at their indifference to what one says to them. They repeat details
eternally, details they describe as their “experience”;
they come back again and again to the same thing.

Please don't
misunderstand me! I'm certainly not pointing to any of these things
in a trivial sense. My intention is to show you that such phenomena
can only be really understood if one grasps clearly the connection
I've been pointing to during these few days: that there is always a
step into spiritual life and its extreme opposite — a step into
the physical body. A further step into the spiritual world for the
saint; a further step into the body, into seizures, for instance, for
the psychopath. And so on. That is the relationship. If you consider
how in the external world, in electricity and magnetism, one pole is
always dependent upon the other, you will realize that in life too
there can be such a relation between two poles of human
development.

This, of course,
cannot be seized upon clumsily, as happens today so often with the
materialistic worldview. This fact, that there are polar opposites
here and that there is a connection between the two poles, must be
approached with delicacy. Then one will begin to see what can develop
in the one and the other direction. One will finally learn in this
way to see into the nature of the human being.